If you’re a small business owner, you must have already learned the true value of using a quality CRM (customer relationship management) software to automate your marketing and sales. With so many things on your mind, you’re always looking for ways to save some time and effort and focus on things that require more creativity.
Let’s say you’ve done your research and decided Salesforce is the right CRM for your business. The data documenting all the hard work you’ve done to draw visitors to your website, collect leads and convert them into customers is now available in your Salesforce account.
But all that hard work will be in vain if your customers start canceling their accounts after a month or so. Provided that you use a quality CRM (such as Salesforce), retaining your customers or at least reducing your churn rate (we’ll go into the churn rate in more details a bit later) should be easier than acquiring those customers in the first place.
In fact, depending on your niche, customer acquisition can be 5-25x more expensive than customer retention. If we add to that that a 5%-increase in customer retention can lead to more than a 25% increase in profit, it’s clear that reducing customer churn should be one of your top priorities.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to use Salesforce to retain more of your customers. But first a word or two about the tool itself…
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce advertises as the world’s #1 CRM platform that allows you to “sell, service, and market smarter”. Moreover, as the Salesforce website asserts, it’s much more than just a CRM solution – it’s what they refer to as a Customer Success Platform.
Salesforce is one of the pioneers in the area of cloud computing and one of the most widely known names in CRM and marketing. It offers a wide range of CRM applications and is particularly famous for its sales and support products.
Brands and companies of all shapes and sizes use Salesforce to manage their customer information. From small businesses (such as The Chapar or Ram Tracking) over medium-sized companies (like Just Eat or Kuoni) to enterprise clients (such as Financial Times, O2, and Aston Martin), more than 150,000 customers have had success with Salesforce so far.
In this post, we’re going to show you how to use Salesforce to boost your own business by (among other things) reducing your customer churn rate.
What Does Salesforce Do?
As stated on the Salesforce official website:
“It brings together all your customer information in a single, integrated platform that enables you to build a customer-centered business from marketing right through to sales, customer service and business analysis. This gives you more complete understanding of your customers to drive your business’s success.“
Products and Solutions Offered by Salesforce
Salesforce offers a wide range of products and services, each aimed towards a specific set of business needs.
If your company is dealing in B2B (business-to business) or B2C (business-to-customer), then the Salesforce Sales Cloud is the thing for you. Even though this CRM platform is primarily dedicated to managing your sales, it also allows you to control your marketing and customer support efforts to a certain extent.
It’s a platform designed for your organization’s customer service and support team. Some of its most useful features are case tracking and social plug-in for conversation and analytics. The Salesforce Service Cloud enables your customer service agents to resolve customer issues in a faster and easier way.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform gives you access to one of the most powerful digital marketing platforms out there. Your company’s marketers can use it to manage email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, content creation and management, customer journey, and data analytics.
If you need a social platform for your organization to connect and facilitate communication among your employees, partners and customers then Salesforce Community Cloud is the service you need. You can use this platform to exchange data and images in real time.
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables your company to provide positive and engaging customer experience both online and in-store. Its powerful customer data integration is one of the strongest suits of this platform.
With the Salesforce Einstein Analytics, anyone can drill into data and analyze new business opportunities. Its a powerful business intelligence platform that enables your company to work with big data and present it through charts, graphs, and other graphical data representations.
Quip is a Salesforce solution that enables you to easily create, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and checklists.
What is Churn Rate?
Customer churn rate is defined as the percentage of customers lost (customers that don’t buy your products or services anymore, have switched service providers, canceled their subscription, or closed their account).
Churn rate is calculated by dividing the total number of customers lost by the number of customers you had at the beginning of a certain time period.
Let’s say, at the start of June, a company had 500 customers, but at the end of June only 450. Their churn rate is: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%.
How to Use Salesforce to Reduce Your Churn
1. Keep all your customer information in one place
How exactly? By using integrations. The Salesforce’s rich integrations system enables you to get a 360° view of your every customer by connecting all your applications, platforms, data, and devices across a number of clouds and systems.
Why is it important to have all your customer information in one place?
Let’s say your marketing team uses HubSpot, your lead generation team uses LeadQuizzes, your customer service team uses Zendesk, and your sales team uses Salesforce. The Salesforce Integration Cloud enables you to easily integrate Zendesk, HubSpot, and LeadQuizzes and create a transparent customer information hub.
This will make your business more agile and make it much easier for your marketing, lead generation, sales, and customer support teams to get on the same page and have detailed information about each and every customer in one place.
Who benefits the most from having all of your customer information in one place? Your customer support team. And your customers, of course. By being able to access all the data on a particular customer, you’re making sure your customer support is top-notch.
Top-notch customer service means satisfied customers. Satisfied customers mean lower churn rate.
2. Use your customer information to personalize your content
While managing your customer relationships, you’re also gathering tons of valuable information about them. And, if you follow the advice above, you’ll have all of that information at your fingertips in Salesforce.
As I already mentioned above, your customer information can be used to improve your customer service. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The best thing about customer behavior data is that it enables you to personalize your content and services so as to fit an individual’s specific needs.
But how to use Salesforce to serve personalized content to your customers?
To make sure your content reaches its ideal customer, it’s vital that you segment your audience. And here’s where Salesforce kicks in again. Use the data you’ve obtained and gathered in Salesforce first to segment your audience and then to send them personalized emails.
To send the emails, you can use Salesforce itself or you can integrate it with one of the email automation tools such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact or Aweber, etc.
Why is it important to personalize? Studies have shown that 52% of customers prefer personalized marketing, while personalization can improve customer retention by up to 16%.
3. Track inactive customers and re-engage
If a customer hasn’t been in touch for 6 months or more, chances are you’re losing them. Salesforce enables you to track customer interaction by sorting and searching them by date of the last contact.
The entire process can be automated so as to receive an update every week or every month. Or, for example, you could use Salesforce to run a report for customers who haven’t interacted with you in more than six months. Here’s how to use Salesforce to get such a report:
– Click on “Reports” and then on “New Report”
– Click on the folder “Accounts & Contacts,” then on “Contacts & Accounts,” and then on “Create.”
– The Date Field should be on “Last Activity”
– Set the date range so that the “From” field shows no date, while the “To” field shows 6 months ago.
– Click on “Run report” and you’ve got yourself a bunch of new old leads!
After you do so, you can reach out to your inactive customers and give them an offer based on their previous interactions so as to get them to re-engage.
Salesforce Competitors
While Salesforce is an all-around CRM software with solutions for all business areas, Zoho CRM is geared more toward sales. Also, one of its strongest suits are an in-depth analytics and rich integrations network.
Even though Hubspot’s CRM may not be as packed with features as some other solutions, it still has one important advantage – it’s free.
One of the most popular Salesforce competitors, Infusionsoft enables you to easily automate your marketing and sales. If you’re looking to learn more about how you can use Infusionsoft to grow your revenue, we’ve got you covered.
Whether you decide to opt for Salesforce or some of its competitors, one thing is for sure – managing your customer relationships with one of these software solutions will make your life much easier.
Even though this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CRMs and their uses, I hope this article has provided you with at least some ideas on how to use Salesforce to boost your business.
Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes
Get Started
Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes
Get Started